I can say with confidence that the shift from 4G/LTE to 5G where I live now in British Columbia (Canada) mountains is not fun. It's significantly less reliable. I understand that its 10x faster, but I'd much prefer reliable over fast when it comes to mobile phones.
In Belfast I get 115/20 mbps down/up with EE, I think I remember hearing there's something dodgy with whether what your phone shows as 5G is actually 5G but that's easily fast enough for anything I'm likely to be doing from my phone.
I'd say it's been like this for years. Looking at a coverage map it looks like it gets spottier out west where fewer people live though
4G has been incredibly reliable for me. Even on a £10/month SIM only thing, I was up a volcano in the middle of nowhere in Iceland and able to make calls.
I found in the UK most carriers 3G was horrid, and 4G actually worked. Vodafone best, second was Three, then O2. Circ early 2020s.
It'll last a day or two with good cell reception; longer in airplane mode.
1G/2G/3G all need to have a dedicated channel for itself. They were usually given the frequencies with the longest range, which is the 800MHz band. When 4G was introduced it couldn't share that band with 3G, so it was usually given space on higher frequencies around 1800MHz and 2500MHz. Those bands also allow a higher data rate, and anyone out of their range could fall back to 3G so it's a win-win, right?
Buuuuut now we're stuck with 4G in a band with poor reception, and throwing out 3G means losing coverage. Ideally the 4G sites in low-density areas would be moved to 800MHz, but that's going to require significant effort because every single antenna will need to be modified by engineers. Had 4G been deployed to 800MHz initially this wouldn't have been an issue - but that wasn't really possible because it would've meant worse speeds for existing 3G customers.
This whole issue is avoided with 5G because 4G and 5G were explicitly designed to coexist on the same channel.
As population density goes up, the higher frequency bandwidths become much more desirable. This is part of the reason why the WiFi standard has been pushing up into 5ghz and 60ghz frequencies. Because you don't want your wifi signal to be yelled over to the neighbor.
Seems reasonable. Is this supposed to be a bad thing?
Where I'm from, the same discussion appears every two years, when the government tries once more to shutdown FM radio. Luckily, they always get shut down by the people. Maybe don't try to shut down public services that millions of people actually rely on.
in the US, what killed FM radio is the death of independent stations with local DJs, replaced by nationwide corporate homogeneity
That said, I don't understand what's so hard about just running both digital and analog in parallel for 20 or even 30 years. This would create an incentive to upgrade to the new, digital standard (better quality, more programming etc.) without outright cutting millions of people and their legacy devices off.
The US arguably did a better job transitioning to digital radio by using a digital system (HD radio) that seamlessly falls back to an analog AM or FM signal, and they have more constraints in terms of broadcast licensing restrictions than most other countries.
Is this sarcasm? Just in case it is not:
Maybe 12 years ago, I had a device with sideloading that allowed me to run Plex (genuinely used for photo viewing). NowTV removed side-loading via a forced update and thus removed the principle reason I bought that device rather than another. Bought a FireTV stick after that and downloaded Plex from their appstore.
The second paragraph mentions that 2G will be around for a decade or so longer, so that's the route voice will take.
My bet would be that these are mostly devices given to children to watch Youtube and what-not.
> However, calls and texts will continue to work despite the 3G switch off, as 2G won’t be fully switched off until 2033 the latest. This is because 2G is still used for critical infrastructure, including legacy connectivity solutions that typically have a longer product life.
Is it really that much overhead to keep 2G networks operating? It's very difficult to get behind any type of cellular technology when tomorrow it could be turned off.
iPhone 5 was the first to support 4G and I’m not sure the 4s or 4 are really suitable for watching YT these days?
Hardly. Good luck running non-supported OS’s on iOS devices. So all of the old iphones and ipads are out.
Even on Android only a tiny statistically irrelevant proportion would both with this.
I don't see why not either - if the device was capable of H264 when it was released, why not now?
Network spectrum, perhaps? Once 2G is switched off that spectrum can be repurposes for other stuff, and it's a finite resource.
It's possible to emulate all that at various levels, but that doesn't come for free (in terms of complexity, hardware, and spectrum). Maybe in 10 years it'll be cheap enough that it'll just be done in the spare cycles of some 6G or 7G SDR network, though, if that's worth the extra spectral inefficiency.
For me that's the value - a low bandwidth network that is reliable and continues to be supported.
I agree that mandatory obsolescence is a bad thing, but the first 4G networks went online in 2009 and are now 15 years old. Dropping support for >10-year-old handsets isn't great, but definitely understandable. If you're mad at anyone, it should be the companies who keep selling 3G-only handsets until this very day.
At one point BT hired Tom Baker to use his voice on their TTS system. I'm sure more people would use it if they kept his voice: https://youtu.be/aFsOhJgCSpw
The amount of client devices that would need to be replaced is only declining.
https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/broadband/article/digital-vo...
Maybe it's a function of what type of M2M devices were rolled out most commonly in a country? For example, parking meters and vending machines often communciate via SMS in Germany; that works on 2G, so they might not even have a 3G modem.
On the other hand, I've seen a mobile payment terminal with a built-in 3G modem (but no LTE) that basically became obsolete with the 3G shutdown, since it falls back to GPRS which is hopelessly overloaded and/or just too slow for applications not geared towards it.
By 2015. All Smartphone from major manufacture, including Apple has a top to bottom LTE capable Line Up.
i.e If the phone is 3G only, it is either very old or specifically designed for Voice and SMS only aka old Nokia non-smart phone.
Include me in that. I have an old phone with a discount SIM installed. I only use it for certain international calls. Wikipedia and elsewhere describe it as "GSM / HSPA+ / LTE", and then explain that LTE "is also called 3.95G and has been marketed as 4G LTE and Advanced 4G" etc.
I would guess that a large subset of those handsets are for 'emergency' use. Phones kept in car glove boxes and hand bags and rarely or infrequently used and never for internet.
Like voting. Yes it's a democracy problem if you have historically made it difficult or less likely for some groups to have ID, to suddenly require it. But it's not a democratic problem to require ID after first ensuring everyone has free and easy access to ID, and actually have the ID.
in the US, mentally ill drug addicted homeless people living on the street generally have smartphones
That said, I still think that "freedom from tech" is an important social issue, regardless of how society tends to be divided on it.
In democracies, the second any interaction with a public institution mandates some kind of technology, without providing an alternative, I would assume a basic free option would have to be provided to legal resident of such country.
In think in 10 years you will have almost no real bank tellers anymore. That's no problem for most of the people, but I don't think that the right thing to do in the broader sense. There are lots of (technology) illiterate people that needs some kind of physical service.
- Bank offices (and ATMs) disappearing. - Post offices disappearing. - Customer service disappearing (phone especially) in lieu of the always useless "check our frequently asked questions / forums" - Cashiers disappearing in lieu of self checkout.
I'm sure it's not just Belgium. The problem appears to be that there's no big enough incentive to service the long-tail (P90) once most day-to-day stuff can be done by yourself, usually digital. Service as collateral damage of efficiency.
Should we ask the government to ensure that any company providing critical services (banking, telecommunications, distributing food) offers a minimum level of service? Because without outside incentive I only see us going further down this road.
Part of me thinks it's inexcusable now for people under a certain age. If you're 70 today in a developed country, you've had the internet for 20 years and a smartphone for at least 10. That's plenty of time.
But all of this is of course just like my opinion man. Just a very interesting topic to think about.
The free option can cost a lot. Digitalization is pushed because the government want to reduce "first level support". You get to talk to robots, for hours and then get an appointment in months.
When I applied for my Irish passport, the only way to inquire about the process of my application was via Twitter. (They had something that superficially looked like a contact widget on their website, but it was nonfunctional)
This is a strange assumption given it has zero historical basis and is, by and large, a modern invention.
That said, I know it's a bit of a leap from paper to internet access. In my country at least, I can say confidently that there is a law mandating free access to government services. At least such services that you are required by law to interact with.
I guess you don't actually live in the UK then. There is nowhere to go "in person" to interact with HMRC for instance. You can still send them paper forms for most things, but the result will be saved in your online HMRC profile, so you haven't bypassed anything.
>>I would assume a basic free option would have to be provided to legal resident of such country.
You'd assume wrong. The argument is that all of these options are "free" so what are you complaining about.
Same thing is happening with banks - branches are closing down across the country in droves, with a lot of people reporting that they now have to travel 1h+ to their nearest branch if they need to do something in person(and annoyingly banks themselves force that - you can't deposit a cheque over £500 online for instance, you have to do it in person for some idiotic reason)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(FCC_program)
What you've linked is some unaffiliated site, the official website of the administrator of the program is here: https://www.lifelinesupport.org/
(that is to say, majority of people only have a phone these days)
At work we use Sierra Wireless modems which are only 3G + 4G. So in practice only 4G in many countries already now or in a couple of months.
The Netherlands close down 2G but keep 3G. (I am being told, not living or working there.)
In general, each industry or other organizations hit by changes will be vocal against those changes. Countries implement them when everybody is OK with them or when the organizations not OK with them are politically too weak to matter.
You can still use any phone supporting 2G (which is essentially all 3G phones) for phone calls and texting. If you need fast data, you'll need to upgrade – and chances are your 10-year old phone isn't very good at displaying modern websites anyway. There are root CA certificates that have expired since some of these phones received their last software update, for example.
Compare that to the daily disposable plastics just for food. Or the amount of plastics for shipping and storing goods.
